The Arizona sentinel., 1887-11-19
PANICS IN THEATERS.
The Senseless Madness That Takes Hold
 of Some People.

OI OOHlc oOPAOs
 It seems impossible, when you look around at gallant men and amiable women, sitting placidly at a play, that in a moment, on the utterance of one word, they can be turned into dumb, driven cattle, senseless. suicidal idiots. But it is so. Any night th e auditorium of a fashionable theater may echo to some unfortunate note of alarm. In an instant the gray haired banker, whose dignity gave tone to bis whole section, is walking up the backs of women and over the heads of children.
 At the Park Theater one night (the theater that happily was destroyed by fire about three hours before the time when it would have been packed by New York's best people to witness Miss Langtry's debuD some dude, entering up the unsafe and tortuous stairway, threw his cigarette through the iron grating of the steps. s ome accumulated rubbish began to smolder, and a volume of smoke poured into the auditorium. About half the audience sitting there knew that the stage had an enormous square opening direct upon Twenty second street-a door not ten feet from the level of the street. Every soul in the house could have gone over the low footlights, crossed the stage, and been in Twenty street in three minutes time. They had all entered the theater by the crooked, narrow passage; they all knew its miserable limits; they saw the smoke coming in at that narrow passage, and yet when some scared scamp near the door jumped to his feet and screeched "Firer' they all with one accord start ed to the rear, regardless of life or limb. Luckily, that night stalwart policeman, with the lungs of a StentOr, calmly said: "There ain't no fire; it S been put out" He grabbed the first lot of mad people and bodily put 'em down into seats; but for few min utes there was the widest kind of scrimmage. A well-known and dignified citizen had sat in high-bred ease two seats ahead of me during the performance. As the panic struck him he rose, mounted over the back of his seat, a nd started to walk on the shoulders of some fashionably at tired ladies. It seemed an occasion for remonstrance and l had a slight but severe remark to make, and made it with an opera glass; the old gentle man took the kindly hint and conclud- ed to walk on his legs in the aisle, but he had made a fair start to tramp to safety over his fellow creatures.
 Another time in the Cosmopolitan Hall at Forty Second street the place was crowded for first night of min strelsy. There was low gallery run ming round the building, supported on a series of iron posts. During the evening one of these pasts slipped off 'the block" and crashed through in- 10 billiard saloon in the basement; the gallery in that particular spot sagged, creaked, and some beam split with alarming noise. In a moment all was excite ment in the crowded gallery, I was sitting few feet in front of this spot. and being fearful that people might begin to jump down on my devoted head, 1 pushed my escort, very inn portant and self-sufficient gentleman, and suggested that we get Into two broad aisles beside him where. if peo- pie jumped, they would not jump on us. got no response, and 1 might as well have pushed at the side of the house, he was so immovable. With 'Ievel-fronting eyelids" he confronted nothing and looked at it steadily. He clasped hard Derby hat against his stomach and was as near petrifaction as is consistent with life.
 After the alarm subsided and the performance was resumed, it was dis covered that my scared friend had crushed his hat on his body as flat as mustard plaster, and pressed the nails of one hand so venomously into the other that the blood had started through the cut skin. Cincinnati E11. quirer.
 He Had Been Helped.